It is known to stack sacks or boxes or the like containing bulk goods onto a pallet which may be engaged by the forks of a fork lift truck for movement from one place to another or for loading into a goods vehicle. A pallelized load is commonly stacked into a goods vehicle and then conveyed by road to a distribution point from which the goods are distributed to customers. The customer may accept the load stacked on the manufacturer's or distributor's pallets but the customer may fail to return the pallets to the distribution point. The customer may have pallets of his own which may become mixed up with the pallets belonging to the manufacturer or distributor. Hitherto no machine of which the applicants are aware has been available which can transfer goods from one pallet to another and such transfer has been carried out by hand which is a time-consuming and expensive operation.
The problems associated with the use of timber pallets in the U.K. transport industry are the subject of a study commissioned by the Committee for Materials Handling Department of Industry and published under the title "Materials Handling pallet usage and wastage" by Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1977.
An object of the invention is to provide a simple and inexpensive machine for transferring a palletized load from one pallet to another so that a distributor can rapidly offload bulk goods from his own pallets onto the customer's pallets.